Why the world will always need superheroes

Year 7 just finished their non-fiction Media unit, which is always my favourite way to end the academic year. The main purpose of the unit is to teach students about the way non-fiction media texts persuade an audience, whether it's to entertain, inform, or manipulate. We explore and analyse films, advertisements (representation of women in advertisements …

Year 9- what a year!

As far as how my school structures the curriculum, the year 9 syllabus has to be my favourite to teach. We introduce GCSE skills at this early stage, but the year is broken up into three modules: Term 1: Crime and Punishment (thematic and genre study comprised of fiction and non-fiction texts) Term 2: Power …

Making feedback ‘student friendly’

I don't know about you, but my school has an obsession with paper-work based feedback. Our marking policy requires us to mark an "extended piece of work" for each class once a term- in addition to the standardised formative assessment that they have mid-year, and the summative end of year test. We spend a good …

Greek Allusion & Agency in ‘Macbeth’

An article that I wrote after a successful term of teaching Macbeth- useful for if you're looking for a new way of reading the text, or enhancing students' understanding of Shakespeare's nods to Greek myth and tradition.   Unless you are versed in the classics, many of Shakespeare’s allusions to Greek and Roman culture and …

Write 4 Rights- Year 9

Teenagers are awesome! After the feminism conference a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about ways to encourage my students to take a more active role in their world. For a lot of my students, who live in a relatively orthodox community, their lack of knowledge about social justice issues in the world might seem …